Suppression and Free Speech in Concord in 1926

While helping to transcribe and review documents for the By the People program set up by the Library of Congress, I came across an opinion piece entitled, “The Free Speech Point of View: Some Reflections on Concord,” written under the pen name Lathrop Loring, really, Lucia Ames Mead. It took getting random documents only three times until I got one about free speech; it really goes to show how ubiquitous it has been in American history — and, as historians know all too well, there is nothing new under the sun.1

The piece was part of the Library's collection on the National American Woman Suffrage Association which formed in the late 19th century from a union of the two major previous groups for women's suffrage — the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Lucia Mead was the President of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association as well as an advocate for pacifism. Her story intersects with the history of free speech at a number of interesting junctures.

According to Mead's account in the piece, students from across the political spectrum had organized a peace conference at a church in Concord in 1926. The students were harassed, particularly by veterans, presumably from the First World War, and as a result were unable to continue their conference. It is not entirely clear from her piece alone what precisely transpired. She references lecturers being “rotting-egged” and the students being “browbeat,” though I cannot tell how literally she means these. I've not yet been able to find the corroborating evidence to flesh out the precise series of events, though clearly it exists somewhere as her piece is in response to another entitled “The Suppressionist Point of View,” and she also references a “manifesto” published by the disgruntled veterans. It seems that that manifesto lead to a “row” in which “hoodlums” agitated by the veteran's denunciations of the speaker somehow interfered with the conference in the church. Mead defends the student's right to free speech writing, “It is not a question whether pacifism or socialism or any other ism is orthodox. It is a question whether any doctrine, however unpopular, which is represented by peaceable people who behave themselves, is to be denied a hearing or stoned out of the home of Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Hoar and Sanborn, or of any self-respecting American community. It would seem that a meeting of a very different character from that reported should be held in the Concord town hall. It would seem that another free speech meeting at the Old South Meeting House would be wholesome.”2

The opposition to the students seemed not merely to be motivated by anger at their pacifism, but also fears of Communist subversion. The students, apparently, were Communists acting to “undermine” the Constitution, or were active agents of the Russian government, Bolsheviks, or carrying on the legacy of a movement started in Bavaria 150 years previously.3 Such language was common during the Red Scare that most Americans are familiar with from roughly 1945 to 1965, most especially during the tenure of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but this was actually the Second Red Scare. The first coincided with the First World War in response to the formation of the Soviet Union. Much like the second, it featured significant repression and paranoia about Communist infiltration into American society, often through the lens of xenophobia. The language used between the two was similar enough that, until I checked the date of the document, I assumed it had been written during the 1950s.

The connection that the veterans seemed to be making between pacifism and Communism probably also came from an equation between the two during WWI as well. Many of the most publicly outspoken opponents of American involvement in the war were socialists.4 These activists were prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition acts which Congress had passed, making it illegal to oppose the war effort. Their arrests led to high-profile cases that are significant in the history of free speech jurisprudence such as Schenck and Debs. That this equation continued after the First Red Scare ended is not surprising; indeed something similar to it continues to exist today.

Mead intersects with the history of free speech in other ways, too. In her article, Mead also defends the students' association with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, from which the American Civil Liberties Union, whose first actions were to defend conscientious objectors to the war and preserve freedom of speech, was ultimately born. I would not be surprised if there were greater connection between her and the Fellowship. She references and defends several individuals who came to speak to the students. Among them was Professor Clarence Skinner from Tufts College. Skinner was an outspoken pacifist and socialist Universalist minister who had himself suffered censorship for his views on other occasions.5Furthermore, she herself was censored; she was banned from speaking at a Southern Presbyterian College because some community members said she was, “a red and a bolshevik.”6

A few details caught my attention. First, her attacks on the (self-) “appointed custodians of patriotism,” no doubt will still sound just as relevant now, almost a hundred years later. “This whole nauseous idolatry of the flag by people who do not manifest the slightest appreciation of the primary principles which the flag stands for has run to inordinate lengths,” she writes, and those lengths have not become more ordinate over time. Another detail I found amusing was that she describes those who had blocked the conference as “hoodlums in khaki,” which immediately evoked for me the scene in Charlottesville. Some things stay the same.

I hope to find more sources on Mead and Skinner; I'd like to dive more deeply into their backgrounds and viewpoints on free speech.

  1. https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/organizing-for-womens-suffrage-the-nawsa-records/subject-file-e-m/mss3413201760/mss3413201760-4/
  2. https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/organizing-for-womens-suffrage-the-nawsa-records/subject-file-e-m/mss3413201760/mss3413201760-6/
  3. A quick Google search on this bizarre point leads me to believe the reference is to conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. It sometimes helps, in our time where conspiracy theories are rampant and widely accepted because they fit with partisan preconceptions, to be reminded that people have always believed crazy nonsense. Misinformation spread plenty fine without the aid of the Internet. 4.That is, outspoken before and during the war, as Americans as a whole were not keen on involvement prior to our actually being engaged in it. President Woodrow Wilson ran his re-election bid, for example, on the idea that he kept us out of the war — a war he had us enter soon after his re-election in one of American history's more well-known ironies.
  4. https://uudb.org/articles/clarencerussellskinner.html
  5. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/7467894/lucia-ames-mead-barred-from-speaking-at/